The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution & the Reversal of Worker's Power in China

from PL Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 3, November, 1971

The accepted view among Marxist-Leninists is that the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (GCPR) was a struggle of the masses, led by Chairman Mao, to defeat the
bourgeois rightists within the Party and thereby prevent their influence from growing to
the point where they could reverse the proletarian dictatorship. The "16-point" Decision
of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Concerning the GCPR
(Aug. 8, 1966) defines the struggle in this way:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old
ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses,
capture their minds and endeavor to stage a come-back. The proletariat must do just the
opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie, in the ideological
field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the
mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against
and such those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and
repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities" and the ideology of
the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature
and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist
economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist
system.

The basic assumption is that the GPCR takes place under conditions of proletarian
dictatorship, i.e. that the working class holds state power and has successfully carried
through the socialist transformation of the material base. A Red Flag
editorial of Feb., 1967 made the goals more concrete and defined the enemy:

Proletarian revolutionaries are united to seize power from the handful of persons
within the party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road....Adequate attention
must be paid to the role of revolutionary cadres in the struggle to seize power....The can
become the backbone of the struggle to seize power and can become leaders in this
struggle....A clear distinction must be drawn between those in authority who belong to the
proletariat and those who belong to the bourgeoisie....

The overwhelming majority of the ordinary cadres in the Party and government
organizations, enterprises and undertakings are good and want to make revolution.

The official documents of the GPCR state that 95% of the cadre are revolutionary, that
only a "small handful of capitalist-roaders" have "wormed their way"
into the party and that even leading cadres who have made serious mistakes can be
re-educated by the masses and allowed to remain in their posts. Thus the GPCR is seen as a
struggle between the Left, led by the proletarian headquarters of Mao, Lin Piao, Chou
En-lai et. al. and the Right, led by the "black gang": Liu Shao Ch'i, Teng
Hsaio-p'ing, P'eng Chen and Tao Chu. Victory went to the Left, preserving and
consolidating socialism in China.

But this picture is confused by a third force on the scene. Mao and official CCP
statements refer often to "extreme-leftists" who attack all the leading
cadre, engage in "bitter armed struggle", deny the People's Liberation Army
(PLA) is a supporter of the Left, despise Chou En-lai and the other bureaucrats of the
State Council and launch indiscriminate attacks against China's nationalist allies. What
do we know about this "extreme-left" and what was its program?

Many of the large mass organizations of students and workers formed to overthrow the
"capitalist-roaders" espoused "extreme-Leftist" views. In Hunan
province, the "Sheng-Wu-Lien", a coalition of 20 Red Guard and rebel-worker
groups, claimed 2 to 3 million followers. In Kwangsi, the "April 22 Rebel Grand
Army" was one of the two largest mass organizations and came repeatedly into conflict
with the PLA and the Central Authorities. In Peking, "extreme-Leftists" were
strong in the Red Guard Congresses of Tsinghua and other universities. In Canton, the
"Red Flag" was an "extreme-Leftist" group which was for a time the
largest organization in the city and the major antagonist of the Military Region Command
which ruled the city. Another important "extreme-Leftist" group was the
"Red Guard Army", known in Canton as the "August 1 Combat Corps",
which was made up of de-mobilized veterans of the PLA and several times resisted orders to
disband. Similar organizations existed in urban areas. The consensus of Red Guard sources
and western scholars who have studied the question is that somewhere between 30-40
million people followed these organizations.

Moreover, these local organizations, based in factories, schools, cities and regions
began to develop an extensive network of connections. Red Guards traveled frequently to
congresses where experiences and ideas were exchanged; liaison stations were established
in many cities by important local groups, e.g., the Chingkangshang Rebel Red Guard group
of Peking University had representatives in Canton, Wuhan and Shanghai. These congresses
and stations were the beginning of a movement toward political and ideological unification
of the "extreme-Left" which proceeded rapidly until smashed by the government
and the Army between Sept. 1967 and July 1968.

These facts make it clear that we are dealing here with a political movement quite
different from the isolated sectarian groups whom Lenin had attacked as
"ultra-left" after World War I. This is a mass movement which frequently put
forward positions in contradiction to Mao/Lin/Chou and came into sharp conflict with the
PLA under their leadership.

An article in a Shanghai periodical in late July, 1967 characterized the politics of
the "extreme-Left" in this way:

Recently, a sort of so-called 'new trend of thought' prevails in society. Its
principal content is to distort the major contradiction of socialist society into one
between the so-called 'power-holders', i.e., the 'privileged persons' who hold 'property
and power' and the masses of the people. It demands an incessant 'redistribution' of the
social property and political power under the proletarian dictatorship. The new trend of
thought has equated the current GPCR with a conflict for wealth and power 'within a
reactionary ruling class'. It has equated the headquarters of Mao/Lin with that of
Liu/Teng/Tao. It has branded all leading cadres as privileged persons and thrust them all
into the position of objects of revolution. (CNS, No. 188)

The "extreme-Left" held that China was already in the hands of a bourgeois
ruling class at the time the GPCR began, that the vast majority (90%) of the
leading cadres were part of that oppressor class, that the PLA was its tool to smash the
real Left and maintain power, that the new "red" bourgeoisie had emerged during
the 17 years from 1949-66 from the ranks of the revolutionaries themselves and, therefore,
that the GPCR was not, as Mao said, a struggle to consolidate proletarian rule, but the
first revolution in history to attempt to take power back from the revisionists.
This basis analysis led the "extreme-Left" groups to carry out the following
political campaigns.

1) They demanded the ouster of Chou En-lai as the chief representative of China's
"red" capitalists, along with the high-ranking economic and administrative
ministers he was sheltering.

2) They demanded that the GPCR be carried into the Army Officer Corps, which they saw a
part of the new ruling class. They engaged in arms seizures from the PLA, raiding depots
and arms trains, on the principle that a revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie had to be
an armed struggle of the masses.

3) They looked to the Paris Commune as the model of the institutions of the proletarian
state and fought to establish the commune-type of state throughout China (abolition of the
standing army, worker's wages for officials, election and right of recall of all
officials).

4) They opposed China's foreign policies of alliance with secondary imperialists
(France, etc.) and bourgeois nationalist regimes (Indonesia, Pakistan, etc.). To carry
this through they seized foreign ships in the harbors, burned the British consulate in
Aug. 1967, launched a liberation struggle in Hong Kong, seized Soviet arms going to
Vietnam over China's railroad lines and opposed China's nuclear development program.

5) They began to discuss and implement the formation of a new Marxist-Leninist
Communist party, given their assumption that the CCP had become the party of the bourgeois
apparatus which was restoring capitalism under the ideological cover of Marxism-Leninism.

The "extreme-Left" presented a view of what was going on in the GPCR which
was contradictory to the official views of the CCP under Mao. ("95% of the cadres are
good" vs. "90% of the political cadres must step aside".) If their analysis
of the political situation in China was correct, if China was at that time ruled by a
"red" bourgeoisie, then the "extreme-Left" is, in fact, the Left
and Mao and his allies are the principal section of the "red bourgeoisie". The
attack on Liu Shao-ch'i and a tiny minority of high officials was therefore a struggle within
this bourgeois class between those who wanted to develop China through dependence on the
Soviet Union and those who wanted an independent path. Mao and Lin Piao attempted to
mobilize the masses to their side by appropriating many of the ideas and slogans of the
Left and presenting them in watered-down versions. We are not arguing that this was, in
every case, a conscious process of deception; but that the ideology of new-democracy/Mao
Tse-tung Thought objectively led the proletarian and peasant masses into an alliance with
a part of the bourgeoisie (the 95% of "good cadres") allowing this part to
consolidate its power at the expense of the masses and sacrificing only an especially
discredited group of officials as scape-goats.

It is necessary, therefore, to make an objective historical analysis of the
developments of socialism in China, in order to determine whether the position of the
"extreme-Left" in the GPCR was correct.

Throughout the period of revolutionary struggle in the countryside, (1927-1949) the
line of the CCP contained two contradictory aspects: on the one hand there was a
"poor-peasant" class struggle line directed against both the landlords and the
capitalist rich-peasants and calling for collective forms of landholding; on the other
hand, there was "rich-peasant" new-democratic class collaborationist line
directed solely against the most important landlords and the Japanese imperialists and
advocating partial reliance on local capitalists. These two lines were in constant
struggle, giving CCP policy and practice a vacillating and inconsistent character. The
class-struggle aspect was primary during the period of civil war against the Kuomintang
(1946-1949) and led to victory and proletarian dictatorship. But the new-democratic line
became primary right after the seizure of power.

This new-democratic political line anticipated a transition period during which
capitalism was to be allowed to develop further, although under close regulation, so as to
create the material and ideological conditions for making the transition to socialism
gradually and without further armed struggle. The CCP had promised the people immediate
benefits from the elimination of the landlords and the imperialists and the opening up of
new opportunities for individual and collective enrichment. On the eve of victory, Mao
defined the party's task:

If we know nothing about production and do not mast it quickly, if we cannot restore
and develop production as speedily as possible and achieve solid successes so that the
livelihood of the workers, first of all, and that of the people in general is improved, we
shall be unable to sustain our political power, we shall be unable to stand on our feet,
we shall fail...

In this period, all capitalist elements in the cities and countryside which are not
harmful but beneficial to the national economy should be allowed to exist and expand...But
the existence and expansion of capitalism in China will b restricted from several
directions...Restriction versus opposition to restriction will be the main form of class
struggle in the new-democratic state. (Report to 2nd Plenum of 7th Central Committee CC).)

"RED" CARPET FOR SUDANESE BUTCHER

On August 6, Major-General Gaafar Mohamed Nimeri (P.S.C.), President of the Revolution
Command Council, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic Republic
of Sudan, and the Sudanese Friendship Delegation led by him arrived in Peking by special
plane on a state visit at the invitation of the Chinese Government. Several hundred
thousand revolutionary people lined the main thoroughfare of the capital to extend a grand
and warm welcome to the distinguished Sudanese guests from the Arab anti-imperialist
front.

A grand ceremony was held at the airport where the national flags of China and the
Sudan were fluttering. The band played the nation anthems of the Sudan and China.
Accompanied by Premier Chou En-lai and Chief of the General Staff Huang Yung-sheng and
others, President Nimeri and the other distinguished guests reviewed a guard of honour
made up of men of the three services of the P.L.A., militiamen and Red Guards, and walked
round to meet the newcomers.

Peking Review, August 14, 1971

CAIRO, July 22 -- The Sudanese leader who was deposed in a coup d'état Monday
reclaimed power today after neighboring Libya ordered a plane carrying two his rivals down
and then took them into custody. According to broadcasts from the Sudan, Maj. Gen. Gafaar
al-Nimery was restored to the premiership by loyal officers and troops who staged a
countercoup. The general went on the radio tonight and called on the Sudanese people to
seize all Communists and turn them over to the police or the army.

New York Times

There was only one way to bring about an immediate restoration and growth of the
national economy: rely on the former ruling class which had learned the methods and skills
required to keep the economy functioning. This meant, in particular, enlisting into the
service of the new state the large body of technicians, managers, engineers, government
administrators and intellectuals who had served the old regime. According to An Tzu-Wen (NCNA,
Sept. 30, 1952), the cadre force had quadrupled between '49-'52, from 720,000 to 2,
750,000. The bulk of these were the so-called "retained cadres", capitalist
managers and ex-Kuomintang civil servants. Some were peasants and workers who had
distinguished themselves in various political campaigns, especially the land reform; but
the CCP was mistrustful of the many rural activists who had tendencies during land reform
to commit "Leftist" errors, meaning that they had carried expropriation into the
ranks of the rich peasants, whom Mao wished to preserve as a source of increased
production. Another group consisted of recent graduates of colleges and special cadre
training schools.

The ideological commitment of the bulk of cadres was thus not to socialism, as a system
of social relations among men, but to national economic development, which they would ten,
as a result of class background and education, to conceive in capitalist terms. The CCP
tried to counter this situation by intensive political education of the new cadres and
mass campaigns in which the workers were encouraged to criticize all elements of personal
corruption, bureaucratic style of work, etc. that they found in the cadres. But these
steps could not in any short period alter the basic ideological orientation of the bulk of
the new cadres.

Moreover, many of the cadres were taken into the party, in order to subject them to its
discipline and facilitate their ideological re-molding. Party membership rose from
3,000,000 in mid-1948 to 5,800,000 in mid-1951. (Official CCP figures in Schurmann, p.
129.) It was inevitable, given the new-democratic line, that the CCP would attract many
whose primary commitment was not to socialism but to the protection and advancement of the
interests of the bourgeoisie. The repeated anti-Rightist struggles of the next decade
(1954-55, 1957, 1959) testify to the existence of this element within the Party.

The "retained" cadres, as well as the newly trained college graduates, were
paid the wages which they were accustomed to receiving. Given their primarily bourgeois
orientation, only material reward commensurate with the privileged position of managers
and administrators within capitalists society would induce them to serve the new state
power. This created a contradiction with the system under which the Communist cadres had
lived before liberation, the so-called "supply-system". All cadres, whatever
their responsibilities and positions, from the rank-and-file on up to top leadership were
provided with the basic necessities of life in kind, plus a little pocket money for
incidentals. This created an egalitarian and democratic style of work. It was a concrete
application of communist principle of distribution: "From each according to his
ability, to each according to his need." Those who were committed to serving the
people by destroying the system of exploitation and creating a new system of socialism
should be willing to do the work they were capable of without special material reward.
This corresponded to the lesson Marx, Engels and Lenin had drawn from the experience of
the Paris Commune, that fundamental principle of proletarian dictatorship must be that
work for the state be performed at average workers' wages.

After Liberation, the supply-system for Communist cadres contradicted the wage system
under which new cadres were paid, a wage system which necessarily contained large
differentials between high and low levels, it being a basic idea of bourgeois society that
the mental work of administration and management is superior to manual work and ought to
be rewarded correspondingly. The CCP leadership then made the choice to eliminate the
supply-system and bring all the cadre, both Party and non-Party, both pre-Liberation and
post-Liberation, under a unified wage-grade system. This was completed by a State Council
Order of Aug. 31, 1955:

for the purpose of putting into effect the principle of to 'each according to his
work' and 'equal pay for equal work', the supply system now applicable to a section of
government employees is to be changed into a wage system of pay and allowance for
governmental employees and facilitate the building of socialism. (NCNA, Sept. 14,
1955. Transl. in SCMP, 1134, 1, 12.)

At the same time, the cadre wage system was consolidated into a 30-grade scale with the
following monthly wages: (from Barnett, p. 191)

It is clear from these highly-differentiated wage scales that the principle of the
Paris Commune was not being applied. The payments were thought to reflect correctly the
principle of distribution under the first stage of socialism--'to each according to his
work'. The official editorials explaining the change presented the following view:

The supply system was a system of treatment of government employees adopted at a
time of the revolutionary war when the financial and economic situation was rather acute.
It was built on the premise that the revolutionary workers possessed a high degree of
political consciousness. Its special features were: On the basis of the minimum
subsistence requirements of revolutionary workers, the state was to supply them with a
definite quantity of the essential articles of livelihood...There was thus little
difference between the treatment accorded to cadres at higher levels and the general
rank-and-file government workers, insofar as their personal requirement were concerned. It
may be described as a measure in keeping with the military communist way of life.

If the supply system has played an important role in ensuring the final victory of the
revolution, why should it be replaced now in its entirety by the wage system?....this is
because the supply system is contradictory to the principles of 'to each according to his
work' and 'equal pay for equal work'. (Tu Shao-po & Wang I-cheng in Shih Shih Shou
Ts'e, Sept. 25, 1955. Transl. in ECMM, no. 19, p. 27)

...He who performs better labor and does better work gets a better pay, and equal work
will earn equal pay. In this way, one can be caused to interest himself, from the
standpoint of material interests, in the results of his labor and to link up his personal
interests with the overall interest of the state...(Renmin Ribao, Sept. 14, 1955.
Transl. in SCMP, no. 1134, p. 13)

The CCP leadership thus saw the supply-system not as a desirable application of the
communist principle of distribution but as an expedient adaptation to the conditions of
extreme material deprivation which prevailed before Liberation. The coming of socialism,
with greater abundance of products, would eliminate the necessity for this kind of
egalitarian sharing of difficulties. In this view, Socialism, the first stage in the
development of the new society, is separated from communism by a long period of
development of the productive forces. Only when there is general abundance, the ability to
satisfy the material needs of all the people, could the transition to communism begin.
During the first stage, material incentive still played a powerful role, along with other
aspects of bourgeois thinking, and had to be harnessed to the needs of socialist
development. The supply-system was therefore "utopian" and a violation of the
stage-by-stage development toward communism.

The opposing argument was put forward by Left forces during the Great Leap (1958) and
again during the GPCR. It acknowledged that distribution according to need for the whole
population and for all products could only be introduced gradually but saw the ideological
consciousness of the masses, not the level of development of the material forces
of productions, as the main limitation on the rapidity of transition to communism. To the
extent that people were won to the idea of "serve the people", as against
bourgeois individualism, communism could be introduced in part, even if at a lower level
of shared subsistence than would be possible with the further development of
the economy. In particular, the Party members, as the ideological vanguard
of the working class, and especially the Party leaders should be willing to
apply communist distribution to themselves even if the masses as a whole continued to
cling, in part, to material incentive.

It was, in fact, the bourgeois road that prevailed. Rather than winning the bourgeois
intellectuals to communism, the Party was won to material incentive. This was a
consequence of the new-democratic line. Having taken power without a mass force of workers
and peasants won ideologically to communism and having committed itself to satisfying the
immediate material aspirations of the masses, the party had to rely on the bourgeois
technicians to manage affairs of state and economy. If the masses had been won to a
greater degree to socialism, a totally different course would have been possible--the
creation of new organs of power and administration putting management directly into the
hands of the people, under the leadership of the party. This might have meant,
temporarily, more "disorder" and stagnation of production as the people learned
to fashion and run these new socialist forms, but it would have avoided reliance on
bourgeois forces and ideas and eventual reversal of the revolution. Moreover, the
new-democratic line welcomed into the Party, during the anti-Japanese War, many forces
whose primary commitment was to nationalism and bourgeois land reform. These forces within
the Party were strong enough to bring about the elimination of the supply-system and the
merging of Party cadres into the privileged stratum of officials. The new wage-grade
system provided a framework of material privilege within which a new bourgeoisie could
slowly form and become conscious of its class interest in opposition to further
development toward communism.

THE QUESTION OF A STANDING ARMY

In summarizing the lessons of the Paris Commune, Marx had pointed also to its abolition
of the standing army and replacement by the arming of the workers, the
proletarian militia. In the third of his Letters From Afar (March 11, 1917)
Lenin had explained:

We need a state, but not the kind other bourgeoisie needs, with organs of government
in the shape of a police force, an army and a bureaucracy (officialdom) separate from and
opposed to the people. All bourgeois revolutions merely perfected this state
machine, merely transferred it from the hands of one party to those of another.

The proletariat on the other hand....must "smash", to use Marx's expression,
this "ready-made" state machine and substitute a new one for it by merging the
police force, the army and the bureaucracy with the entire armed people...the
proletariat must organize and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in
order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own
hands, in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power.
(Coll. Works, Vol. 23, pp. 325-326)

The Chinese revolution was made by the armed masses of workers and peasants. After
victory was achieved, the decision was made to disarm the masses and
concentrate weapons in the hands of a standing army which lived in barracks separate from
the masses. At the same time there began an intensive program of modernization, both
technical and administrative, of the PLA which put increased emphasis on knowledge of
military science, on sophisticated weaponry and on professionalism. All of these
developments led, in the early 1950s, to significant moves away from the
democratic-egalitarian traditions of the PLA. They culminated in the State Council order
of Feb. 1955 setting up a system of ranks within the PLA and eliminating the supply-system
for military personnel. This was followed in October by the conferring of the title of
Marshal on the ten top leaders of the PLA, the wearing of shoulder badges and insignia
showing rank, and the creation and award of several types of military decorations. A Renmin
Ribao editorial of Sept. 28, 1955 gave arguments for the new rank system:

Why must the PLA adopt the system of military ranks at present? This is because with
the application of the Military Service Law (conscription), the modern equipment of the
armed forces requires that the training and activities of the servicemen should follow
strict systems and regulations. The ranking and interrelation of the officers should be
clearly defined, and the organization and discipline of the armed forces should be
consolidated...all officers must wear shoulder badges and insignias of their ranks so that
there will be clear distinction between officers and other ranks, between the various
branches of the armed forces....Only in this way would the units of the armed forces be
able to carry out successfully their task of defending the country in a changing situation
and under the new conditions of complex equipment, speed of movement and joint action of
the different branches.

After the adoption of the military ranks, there will be clear distinction between the
officer and the men...Will this affect the close unity of the officers and the men and of
the officers of the upper and lower ranks? The answer is no...there is no clash of class
interests between the officers and men...their interests being the same. The officer and
the men would struggle together to defend the country, protect the interest of the people,
and safeguard the cause of Socialism. There fore the holding of military ranks...implies
that the officers are entrusted with an even greater responsibility and should be even
more concerned with the men and take better care of them...The military ranking system
will also ensure the equality of officers as required by national defense. The modern
revolutionary fighting forces require of the officers not only their loyalty to the
country and the people but also accomplishment in the knowledge of military science as
well as proficiency in modern military techniques....The conferment of titles is
determined on the basis of responsibility, political qualities, abilities, terms of
service and contribution to the revolution (Trans. in SCMP, no. 1147, pp. 3-5)

The new system of ranks also included a wage scale for payment of men and officers,
extending the principle "to each according to his work" to the people's army.
Our best information on these wages comes from Edgar Snow who visited an army camp in his
trip of 1961-62 and was given the following pay figures (The Other Side of the River, p.
289. These figures are in $U.S./month. Snow calculated the monetary exchange himself.)

Private -- 2.50

Corporal -- 4

2nd Lt. -- 20

1st. Lt. -- 24

Captain -- 29-33

Major -- 39-44

Lt. Colonel -- 51-60

Colonel -- 62-64

Senior Colonel -- 74-84

Lt. General -- 144-160

General -- 192-236

Marshal -- 360-400

Why was the principle of the proletarian militia not carried through? In the first
place, it requires a high level of ideological commitment of the masses to the long-term
goal of the party--communism. Only if that ideological understanding exists will the Party
feel that it can rely on the masses to defeat the class enemy during the sharp class
struggle which continues under proletarian dictatorship. If, as in the case of the CCP,
the Party has won the support of the masses by leading a national liberation struggle with
an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, then the concentration of armed force in a
standing army directly under the control of the Party (all officers are Party members) is
seen as a guarantee against the situation where the Party loses, temporarily or
permanently, the support of the masses.

In the second place, the CCP never broke away from the bourgeois concepts of war and
did not carry through the revolutionary idea of people's war. While on a number of
occasions Mao put forward the idea that men are primary over weapons in warfare, he did
not mean by this to deny the role of modern weaponry but only to attempt to control its
use by political criteria. In practice, the CCP invested heavily in modern weapons, going
all the way to atomic weapons in the 1960s. The logic of positional war with modern
weapons corresponds to the kind of professionalism which came to dominate the officer
corps of the PLA.

This does not mean that a proletarian militia is totally unable to use weapons beyond
small arms. But it would adopt them only to the extent that its organization remained
socialist and not elitist. The militia would train in the factories and neighborhoods.
Those with technical knowledge would act as teachers but without becoming administratively
separate fro the masses, nor would this knowledge be kept as a monopoly of the few; rather
all the people would attempt to master the more advanced weapons. Military work would be
an aspect of political work and leadership would not become professional, separate,
institutionalized. Such a people's militia, moreover, would have a powerful weapon only
rarely used in the past, the appeal to proletarian class interests of the soldiers of the
imperialists. A people's war is as much agitational as military in the narrow sense. And
even if defeated temporarily by an army equipped with superior fire-power, the militia
would have maintained the ideological consciousness of the masses and prepared them to
continue to struggle against al their class enemies, while the standing army under
socialism in China became one of the most important breeding-grounds for the new
bourgeoisie and eventually became a tool of that class.

Arming of the people requires that the Party be willing to share power with the masses,
that the dictatorship of the proletariat be seen as a system of worker's rule with
party leadership, a version of Left-center coalition under new conditions, rather
than as a system in which the party monopolizes all positions of power because it is not
willing to trust in the masses and their desire to fight for and defend socialism. This in
turn requires that the party win power, leading masses of people who are consciously
fighting for socialism, not just more material goods or land or peace. And it is
precisely this element that the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions lacked. And the reason
that they maintained a standing army under Party control.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE ECONOMY

So far we have seen some of the effects of the exercise of state power of the bourgeois
aspect that advocated reliance on the capitalist class as a progressive force in the
first-stage of the revolution. But this line, insofar as it was Marxist-Leninist, also had
a proletarian aspect, the intention of moving to socialism in a second-stage and the
mobilization of the masses of workers and peasants to destroy the power of their class
enemies. In 1953, the CCP proclaimed the General Line of the construction of Socialism,
sketching out the Party's plan to gradually expropriate all private capital and lead the
peasants through a number of stages to collective production. Serious disagreements
developed within the CCP around the question of how rapidly and comprehensively to move
toward socialism. Liu and others had foreseen a much longer period of new-democracy and
ascribed a much greater progressiveness to capitalism. They exerted their influence
throughout the fifties to slow down and distort the elimination of the bourgeoisie. The
Left in the party, made up primarily of worker and peasant cadres taken in during the
sharp class struggles of 1947-52, fought constantly to move to higher stages of socialism.

If the Soviet Union wouldn't do (point the way), then he would place his hopes on the
American people. The United States alone had a population of more than 200 million.
Industrial production was already higher than in any other country and education was
universal. He would be happy to see a party emerge there to lead a revolution, although he
was not expecting that in the near future.

In the meantime, he said, the foreign ministry was studying the matter of admitting
Americans from the left, middle and right to visit China. Should rightists like Nixon, who
represented the monopoly capitalists, be permitted to come? He should be welcomed because,
Mao explained, at present the problems between China and the U.S.A. would have to be
solved with Nixon. Mao would be happy to talk with him, either as a tourist or as
President.

I, unfortunately, cold not represent the United States, he said; I was not a monopoly
capitalist. Could I settle the Taiwan question? Why continue such a stalemate? Chiang
Kai-shek had not died yet. But what had Taiwan to do with Nixon? That question was created
by Truman and Acheson.

--Edgar Snow in Life

According to Mao, U.S. bosses are doing fine (high production) and workers poorly (no
revolutions on the horizon). U.S. workers and PLP will shoot his theories to hell.

Mao and his close supporters, applying the new-democratic line, swung back-and-forth
periodically between these two groups and, most importantly, refused to break decisively
with the Right. This created a complex pattern of economic struggle with distinct stages:
1) a sharp advance by the Left with which Mao associates himself, 2) an attempt by the
leadership to restrain the advances and prevent it from passing beyond the new-democratic
framework to a decisive break with bourgeois ideas, and 3) counter-attack and victory by
the Right putting an end to the advance and often retreating to an earlier position. This
pattern characterizes all the major episodes; Land reform (1947-1950), Collectivization
(1955-56), Communization (1958-59), and the GPCR (1966-68).

The first step was Land Reform, initiated as early as 1947 in the old Liberated areas
and completed in 1950-51 in the Southern areas. The property of landlords was taken over
and distributed to the peasants. In the early stages, Leftist cadres and poor peasants had
tended to carry the struggle past the landlords to the rich peasants who owned sufficient
amounts of land to required the employment of hired labor. These rich peasants were rural
capitalists and often had industrial or commercial interests in addition to land. The CCP
leadership quickly put a stop to these "excesses" and Mao summarized the new
line in June, 1950,

Carry forward the work of agrarian reform step by step and in an orderly manner. The
war has been fundamentally ended on the mainland; the situation is entirely different from
that between 1946 and 1948, when the PLA was locked in a life and death struggle with the
KMT reactionaries and the issue had not yet been decided. Now the government is able to
help the poor peasants solve their difficulties by means of loans to balance up the
disadvantage of having less land. Therefore, there should be a change in our policy
towards the rich peasants, a change from the policy of requisitioning the surplus land and
property of the rich peasants to one of preserving a rich peasant economy, in order to
help the early restoration of production in the rural areas. This change is also favorable
for isolating the landlords and protecting the middle peasants and small "renters
out" of land. (Report at CC meeting, June 6, 1950. Transl. in CB, supplement
no. 1, p. 3)

The same new-democratic line, with its prime emphasis on quantity of production,
which required the use of bourgeois "experts" in the factories and state organs,
required that the rural capitalists be allowed to flourish, at least for a time. The CCP
was well aware, from observing the history of the Soviet countryside in the twenties, that
the small-producer economy created by land reform was subject to internal instability;
control of draft animals and implements by the richer peasants would progressively lead to
impoverishment of the "new-middle" peasants and their return to the status of
wage-earners, i.e.,, that a petty-property commodity-producing economy generated
capitalism rapidly and inexorably. It attempted to counter this development by
encouraging, both ideologically and financially, the formation of mutual-aid teams,
arrangements in which peasants would use their privately-owned implements to help each
other by planning collectively the application of those resources. By late 1952, 40% of
rural households were members of such teams, which generally included 7-10 families. In
addition, genuine co-operatives, in which land and larger tools were pooled and used
collectively, although payment was still made for the property contribution of each family
as well as its labor contribution, were formed in many of the areas where land reform had
taken place earliest.

But the policy of preserving the rich peasants left them free to use their political
influence and economic power to enter the mutual-aid teams and co-ops, turning them into
instruments of their individual enrichment, or to destroy them from without. Mao reported
in 1955 that there had been "large scale dissolution of co-ops in 1953" as rich
peasants convinced the other peasants that the road of individual enterprise was superior
to the socialist road of the co-ops. Rich peasants entered the mutual-aid teams in order
to share in the government loans and technical assistance which the teams qualified for.
They then usually managed to get the lion's share of the benefits for themselves. Thus by
1954-55, the class struggle in China had reached a fateful turning point. If no further
mass movement toward socialism could be made, then the countryside would revert to
capitalism and the proletarian dictatorship would certainly be undermined.

But a profound ideological process had been percolating among the peasants in the
preceding years. They had begun to grasp Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of the
Leftist rural cadres. These cadres had not shared in the privileges of the senior cadres
in the cities and lived among and at roughly the level of the peasants. The peasants
initiated in 1955-56 a mass movement to form co-operatives. Leadership was taken by the
poor peasants and the new "lower-middle peasants", former poor peasants who had
received insufficient land and implements from the agrarian reform to be able to survive
without continuing, often in disguised and illegal forms, to hire themselves out to the
rich capitalist peasants, or go deeper into debt to them. By May, 1956, 91.2% of rural
families were members of agricultural producers' co-operatives (APCs). By the end of 1956,
88% were in advanced APCs, in which payment to the individual family was
based only on labor contributed, while property contributed was not compensated beyond the
initial payment for its value. This was a tremendous victory for the Chinese proletariat
and demonstrated concretely that peasants could be won ideologically to fight for
socialism.

While the move along the "socialist road" was the primary aspect of this
rural struggle, the Right forces in the CCP were strong enough to enforce certain
limitations on the movement, to concede certain positions to the bourgeoisie.

The rich peasants were not compelled to enter the APCs, but had to be convinced that is
was in their interest to do so. So, many remained separate, often with the best land and
implements and continued to act as a source of temptation to the upper-middle peasants who
had often reluctantly agreed to enter the APCs. Moreover, the prices set for subsidiary
crops on the free markets were highly favorable and tempted the peasant to divert his
labor and fertilizer from the collective endeavor to his private plot.

The principle of income distribution within the advanced APC was payment according to
labor performed. Material incentive, transferred now from the level of the individual
family to that of the small group, was still the cardinal point. Co-ops with different
ratios of labor power to mouths-to-feed or different qualities of land received therefore
very different per-capita incomes. The party fought vigorously against the tendency of the
poorer peasants to demand more egalitarian distribution in favor of labor-poor families. A
complex system of calculating work-points according to the job performed, the quality of
the work, etc., was introduced, the equivalent of the piece-rate system then being
introduced in industry. This kind of system, beginning from a situation where the APCs are
unequally endowed with labor power and land, would lead to progressively widening
disparities in living standards between poor and rich APCs. A kind of
"collective" exploitation of poorer co-ops by the richer could eventually
result. It was this tendency which led, as we shall see, to the mass movement among the
poor and lower-middle peasants to form the people's communes in 1958.

At the time of our 1965 colloquy, Mao continued, a great deal of power-over propaganda
work within the provincial and local party committees, and especially within the Peking
Party Committee--had been out of his control. That was why he had then stated that there
was need for more personality cult, in order to stimulate the masses to dismantle the
anti-Mao party bureaucracy. Of course the personality cult had bee overdone. Today, things
were different...In the past few years there had been need for some personality cult. Now
there was no such need and there should be a cooling down.

[PHOTO, FOUR YOUNG RED GUARDS HOLDING THE LITTLE RED BOOK SINGING IN FRONT OF LARGE
PICTURE OF MAO]

Picture, from Life magazine, shows cult of Mao is alive and well. Mao reveals how cult,
like all individualism, is tool of the bourgeois class in maintaining power.

Developments in industry had been very similar. In 1949-50 the state had seized the
property of those capitalists who were intimately involved with the imperialists and
politically supported the Kuomintang. This had brought a large part of Chinese industry
into the hands of the state. In 1955-56 the government moved to convert all remaining
bourgeois industrial property into jointly owned state-private enterprise. The state had
complete control over the use of the property and ownership of its output while the former
capitalist owners were compensated for their property in government bonds paying a fixed
rate of interest. Many of the capitalists, in addition to these fixed-income payments,
stayed on as plant directors and staff at the high money salaries prevailing in these
positions and, through the combination of these sources of income, were able to continue
living in a way that was far above that of the average worker and a constant source of
corruption of the government cadres.

The system of management used in both state and joint enterprises was known as
"one-man management" and had been quite consciously borrowed from contemporary
Soviet practice. Its essence was the absolute authority of the manager over day-to-day
operations, hiring and firing, use of available resources. This system was modified in
1956 to give a much greater advisory and supervisory role to the Party committee in the
factory, made up of the most politically advanced workers, but the managers retained great
power.

In June, 1956, the great variety of wage payment schemes which the CCP had inherited
from pre-Liberation factories were unified and rationalized in a systematic wage reform.
This set up a basic wage scale with eight grades, with the wage in the highest (most
skilled) grade being approximately three times the lowest. Roughly 80% of wages was to be
base pay, calculated by hours worked according to skill grade, with the remaining 20%
being used to spur extra output through piecework or bonus remuneration. Material
incentives were the basic technique driving production, as is shown in an important
article commenting on wage reform,

This revision will effectively eradicate equalitarianism and the state of
unreasonableness and confusion obtaining in the current wage system and serve as a
powerful material factor setting into motion the extensive masses of workers and office
employees to strive for fulfillment of the First Five Year Plan ahead of schedule. (Chin
Lin, in Lao-tung (Labor), no. 3, March 6, 1956. Transl. in ECMM, no. 35, pp. 32-35)

A Renmin Ribao editorial of June, 1956, emphasized that piece rates are the most
effective way of tying income directly to the individual quantity and quality of work
performed and advocated their extensive development in the wake of the wage reform. By
1957, about 42% of all workers in state-operated factories and mines were covered by some
sort of piece-rate system. Beginning in 1954, workers were given special monetary rewards
for invention and innovation. Workers were given special bonuses of up to 15% of the
standard monthly wage for achieving cost reductions or over fulfilling output quotas. In
addition, the State Council, in 1955, set down regulations establishing monetary rewards
for scientific contributions aimed at "inspiring the positive and creative talents of
scientific research workers....for serving the construction of the country." Monetary
rewards to scientists represented multiples of the average worker's yearly income, ranging
from 2,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan.

It is fair to say, therefore, that material incentive was the primary idea affecting
the ideology of the Chinese working-class through 1957. This kind of reliance on bourgeois
thought and habits could only weaken the working class ideologically and prevent it from
developing the communist consciousness necessary to enable it to prevent restoration of
the state power of the bourgeoisie. The Party led mass campaigns for ideological
re-molding of the thought of workers and cadres. But these were vitiated by the
inconsistency of the party line and could not change the strong bourgeois ideas
constantly being generated by the material conditions under which people worked.
Moreover, Mao's reluctance to deal self-critically with the theory of new-democracy which
allowed and encouraged the Party's Rightists to devise these schemes, prevented him from
breaking the unity of the Party. He compromised repeatedly with Liu and the other
Rightists on the most fundamental questions.

The Rightist trend of 1956 also extended to the ideological sphere. Initial Chinese
reaction to Khruschev's speech to the 20th CPSU Party Congress was quite favorable. At the
first session of the 8th National Congress of the CCP (Sept., 1956) Liu gave a political
report, as Head of State of the People's Republic, which included the following points,

....The fact that our bourgeoisie has heralded its acceptance of socialist
transformation with a fanfare of gongs and drums is something of a miracle. What this
miracle shows is precisely the great strength of the correct leadership of the proletariat
and the absolute need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

....During the past few years, the national bourgeoisie has taken part in the
rehabilitation of the national economy...In the course of socialist transformation, the
alliance of the working class with the national bourgeoisie has played a positive role in
educating and remolding the bourgeois elements. In the future, we can continue our work of
uniting, educating and remolding them so that they may place their knowledge in the
service of socialist construction. Thus, it can be readily seen that it is wrong to
consider this alliance as a useless burden.

In another speech to the Congress, reported years later in a Red Guard tabloid, Liu is
reported to have said, "The question of who will win in the struggle between
capitalism and socialism in our country has now been decided" and he criticized
"some members of our Party who hold that everything should absolutely be 'of one
color' "--(i.e., the Left).

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD AND THE RURAL PEOPLE'S COMMUNES (RPCs)

The Great Leap period of 1958-59 is very complex because all the conflicting class
forces in society and within the Party participated and put forward very different ideas
and goals for the movement. For the Left, it was an attack on all the aspects of
"bourgeois right" that had been primary up to that time in Chinese institutions;
it put into question and often eliminated material incentives, piece-rates, managerial
authority, high pay differentials, etc. It challenged the existence of the standing army
and the wage system for cadres. For the Left, the large-scale RPCs, amalgamating the
former APCs into units often containing 5,000 to 6,000 households and changing the
existing system of income distribution, were the organizational means for beginning the
transition to communism. The system of free supply of grain was introduced into the RPCs
along with communal mess halls, nurseries, laundries, etc., so that the principle of
distribution "to each according to his needs" was no longer a distant goal
separated from the present by a long process of economic development, but a living
reality. The commune eliminated the private plots of land and raised the socialization of
property to a new level. The income earned by any individual household was determined not,
as previously, by its own individual performance or that of the small work team of which
it was a part, but as a share, based on a political calculation of needs, of the total
output of the commune. Working for the commune, rather that for oneself, became, at least
in part, a living principle.

It is useful here to quote extensively from some of the Left writings of the period, to
show the kind of thinking which lay behind the mass movement of the summer and fall of
1958.

An article which stimulated a lengthy discussion was "Break Away From the Ideas of
Bourgeois Rights", by Chang Ch'un-ch'iao (whom we will meet again as a participant in
the Shanghai Cultural Revolution in 1967),

To support the PLA, thousands of militiamen followed the Army in their march to the
South. They led the same life of military communism as the Army. They did not aim at
becoming officials or getting rich. No idea of wages, let alone "piece-wages"
entered their minds....After the nation-wide liberation, this life of military communism
marked by "supply-system" was still very popular.... Comrades who were inured to
the life of supply system did not covet the wage system....but shortly afterwards this
system of life was subjected to the impact of the bourgeois idea of right. The idea of
bourgeois right has its kernel in hierarchy. In the view of persons imbued with the idea
of bourgeois right, the supply system was undesirable....There was nothing strange in such
arguments brought forth by the bourgeoisie. But soon a number of party cadres were
subjected to the impact of this idea. Among them were heard more criticism of the
drawbacks of supply system while more talks were heard about the merits of the wage
system...In a word, the communist supply system which ensured victory of the Chinese
revolution, was condemned by some people as a serious offense which must be punished.

The main argument against the supply system is that it cannot stimulate production
enthusiasm. Its theoretical basis is the "principle of material interests"
stressed by economists. It is said that as survivals of the old division of labor still
exist under the socialist system, i.e., some distinctions still exist between mental labor
and physical labor, between workers and peasants. and between skilled and unskilled labor,
the principle of "developing production through the material interests of
workers" is represented as a wonderful principle.

....The arguments seem to be very convincing but reduced to the popular language it is
the same as the old saying: "money talks". If high wages are used to
"stimulate", then socialism and communism can be bought like a piece of candy.

What do we have to say about such a theory? It is precisely the workers, who, according
to the above-mentioned economists, are the most concerned with the wage levels, who
express fundamentally contrary views. Shanghai's workers....pointed out that advocates of
this theory want to "let money instead of politics assume command." These words
hit the bull's eye. Of course, we do not deny....that the inequality in "bourgeois
right" cannot be done away with at once....but did Marx tell us that bourgeois
right and bourgeois hierarchy of inequality must not be destroyed but should be
systematized and developed? Did he not say that the principle of "material
interests" should only be partially stressed and that communist education should be
intensified politically, ideologically and morally in order to break down the bourgeois
right?...

....As a result of the attack on the supply system, the living standard which did not
show much difference in the past has changed among out party cadre and some who were not
inured to hardship have rapidly learned manners of gentlemen, high-class Chinese and old
Mr. Chan (a snobby character in Lu Hsun's Story of Ah Q). some cadres feel
displeased when they are not addressed as "heads". This indeed stimulates
something. but it does not stimulate production enthusiasm but enthusiasm in fighting for
fame and wealth....It stimulates estrangement from the masses. Some elements soon
degenerate into bourgeois rightists....Some cadres expect extra pay when they work for
only one extra hour. (Transl. in CB, no. 537, pp. 3-5)

Another article of the same period, "Let us Begin Our Discussion with the Supply
System", by Hu Sheng, put forward the idea that, while it was not possible to
introduce communist distribution "according to needs" generally and completely
until the productive forces of society had developed further, it was necessary to fight
for communist "aspects",

Does the enforcement of the supply system mean realization of communism? It is not
yet the case. Many people's communes in the countryside now provide free meals; some even
provide "three things" (meaning food, clothing, free housing), "five
things" and even "seven things". It is not proper to represent this as
communism.

But it should be said that it contains the communist factors. At a time when products
are not so abundant, the communist "to each according to his needs" principle
cannot be fully realized. By communist factors are meant a comparative uniformity for all
and the "break-up" of the "to each according to his work" framework.
Under the supply system, one will not set a big store by pay....(Transl. in CB, no
537, 33-36)

Under the free grain supply system described in these articles food was provided free
of charge in communal mess halls. Often additional necessities of life were provided free
by the commune. This meant that the poorer co-ops, who previously had difficulty in
providing these necessities, were merged into the larger commune and benefited from the
higher productivity of the more advanced co-ops. Conversely, it meant that the peasants in
the more advanced op-ops, which often meant the ones which had incorporated a larger
number of former rich peasants, had to be willing to share the fruits of their own labor
with the less fortunate, i.e. to put the needs of the commune as a whole above their own
small group material interest. This transformation was no automatic administrative matter;
it was the result of a sharp class struggle led in the countryside by party cadres in
which poor and lower-middle class peasants struggled for the formation of communes while
rich and upper-middle peasants resisted them and tried to undermine the free supply
aspects. The communization movement itself had been preceded in the fall of 1957 by a
sharp anti-Rightist struggle within the Party in which some of the most prominent figures
in economic affairs (such as Ch'en Yun) were demoted because of their opposition to the
Great Leap.

The question about Nixon has been partly answered for us by Chairman Mao in my earlier
report. He told me that Nixon, who represented the monopoly capitalists, should be
welcomed simply because at present the problems between China and the U.S. would have to
be solved with him. In the dialectical pattern of his thought Mao has often said that good
can come out of bad and that bad people can be made good--by experience and right
teaching. Yes, he said to me, he preferred men like Nixon to social democrats and
revisionists, those who professed to be one thing but in power behaved quite otherwise.

Nixon might be deceitful, he went on, but perhaps a little bit less so than some
others. Nixon resorted to tough tactics but he also used some soft tactics. Yes, Nixon
could just get on a plane and come. It would not matter whether the talks would be
successful. If he were willing to come, the chairman would be willing to talk to him and
it would be all right. It would be all right, whether or not they quarreled, or whether
Nixon came as a tourist or as President. He believed they would not quarrel. But of course
he would offer criticism of Nixon. The hosts would also make self-criticism and talk about
their own mistakes and shortcomings--for instance, their production level was lower than
that of the United States.

Mao's phony "dialectics" is high-falutin' cover for sellout of world's
workers and peasants. Genuine dialectical thought is based on distinguishing classes and
being able to tell friends from enemies.

A second aspect of the Left view of the Great Leap was the change in the mode of
economic planning and organization. Rather than professional managers dominating the
factories, with an adversary Party committee, the Left advocated that the Party committee
itself combine political direction with day-to-day management, i.e. putting politics in
command. This new management system was introduced in a number of factories and generally
accompanied the partial elimination of piece rates, narrowing of the pay differentials
among the workers and an increase in the amount of political discussion and struggle
within the enterprises. Control over the planning process was taken away from the central
Ministries and given over to Provincial and county Party committees who were to involve
the workers and peasants themselves much more closely in the process of drawing-up,
reconciling and executing the plans. Overall co-ordination was to be maintained not by
centralized bureaucratic determination of the details of output quotas and resource use
(combing with much reliance on the price-market mechanism) but by de-centralized response
by the masses and basic-level cadres to the general line put forward by the Party
leadership. This kind of de-centralization was very different from that carried out in the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, where more power to lower-level units meant more power to
managers and technicians, not workers.

But there was a contradiction between the Left view of the RPCs as a new form of
organization (with a new ideology) opening up the transition to communism, and the view of
the Party leadership, which saw the Great Leap primarily as a production drive
and the RPCs as a tool which could mobilize labor on a large scale and in a more
specialized fashion to complete the industrialization of the country and catch up to the
capitalist nations. The communes had been preceded by predictions of enormous increases in
production, capital investment, and per/acre yields, both in agriculture and industry, for
the years 1957-62. It was anticipated that Chinese steel production would "catch up
to Britain in 15 years". As part of this plan, the CCP advocated the policy of
"walking on two legs", supplementing the large-scale modern factories in the
cities with a network of smaller-scale regional and local industries making use of the
traditional skills of the workers and peasants and relying on locally-available resources.
The communist aspects of the RPCs, especially rejection of material incentives and growth
of free supply, were always evaluated by the CCP leadership in relation to their
effect on production. This cautiousness can be seen in the official editorials
which followed the Aug. 20, 1958 Communique of the CC giving approval to the communization
movement:

....The establishment of people's communes is shaping up as a new irresistible tide
of the mass movement on a nation-wide scale....The existing people's communes have shown
ever greater superiority over the farm co-operatives in spurring the initiative of the
masses in production, raising the rate of utilization of labor power and labor
productivity, enlarging productive capital construction, accelerating the cultural and
technical revolutions and in promoting public welfare.

....The Chinese peasants, having defeated capitalism economically, politically and
ideologically and having overcome right conservatism in agricultural production, have
carried out agricultural capital construction on an unprecedented scale, adopted advanced
technical measures in farming and thereby are doubling farm yields or increasing them by
several, a dozen or scores of times. At the same time, small and medium industrial
enterprise are being rapidly developed in the countryside to promote the integration of
industry and agriculture and to raise the standard of living of the rural population.

Of course, when the people's communes re established it is not immediately necessary to
transform collective ownership into ownership by the whole people and it is even less
appropriate to starting to advance from socialism, i.e., the primary phase of communism,
to its higher phase. ("Greet the Upsurge in Forming People's Communes", Red
Flag, no. 7, Sept. 1, 1958. Transl. in CB no 517, pp. 1-4)

CCP editorials and resolutions repeatedly stress that the free supply system should not
be taken so far that "production enthusiasm" is affected. As time passed, it
became clear that the new forms of social organization and the new communist ideas were
leading to sharper class struggle in the countryside and that this struggle was likely to
interfere with achievement of the ever more-grandiose production and productivity targets
emanating from Peking. When the CC met for its 6th Plenary Session in Dec. 1958, it issued
a set of "Resolutions on Questions Concerning People's Communes" which carried
the retreat from Leftist views several steps further:

True, the free supply system adopted by the people's communes has in it the embryo
of the communist principle of distribution according to needs; the policy of running
industry and agriculture simultaneously and combining them carried out by the people's
communes has opened up a way to reduce the differences between town and countryside and
between worker and peasant; when the RPCs pass over from socialist collective ownership to
socialist ownership by the whole people, these communist factors will grow further. All
this must be acknowledged....

Nevertheless, every Marxist must soberly realize that the transition from socialism to
communism is quite a long and complicated process of development and that throughout this
entire process society is still socialist in nature. Socialist society and communist
society are two different stages marked by different degrees of economic development.

....The communist system of distribution is more reasonable, but it can be put into
practice only when there is a great abundance of social products. In the absence of this
condition, any negation of the principle of "to each according to his work" will
tend to dampen the labor enthusiasm of the people and is therefore disadvantageous to the
development of production, to the increase of social products and hence to speeding the
realization of communism. For this reason, in the income of commune members, that portion
of the wage paid according to the work done must occupy an important place over a long
period and will, during a certain period, take first place. In order to encourage the
labor enthusiasm of commune members and also facilitate satisfaction of their complex
daily needs, the communes must strive to increase the wages of their members gradually
and, for a number of years to come, must increase them at a faster rate than that
portion of income that comes under the heading of free supply....(Transl. in CB,
no. 542, pp. 7-23) (our emphasis-PLP).

The italicized words represent a major turning point in the development of the
communes. Many of the more advanced had carried through the practice of giving half of
income as free supply; and they had the perspective of gradually increasing that
percentage as social productivity increased. But this resolution implied that this per
cent was for it to decrease. As a result, free supply, in the bulk of the communes,
fell to around 30% in the first months of 1959.

Another paragraph of the resolution altered previously held views on the degree of
socialization of property:

....Some people think that the switch over to communes will call for a
redistribution of existing personal consumer items. This is a misconception. IT should be
publicized among the masses that the means of livelihood owned by members, (including
houses, clothing, bedding and furniture) and their deposits in banks and credit
cooperatives will remain their own property after they join the commune and will always
belong to them....Members can retain individual trees around their houses and small farm
tools, small instruments, small domestic animals and poultry; they can also continue to
engage in some small domestic side occupations on condition that these do not hamper their
taking part in collective labor. (Ibid.)

These may seem like very small concessions to private property, but they were the
opening wedge in a retrogressive movement which was to lead, within a year, to the
restoration of the private plots and the revival of private sideline occupations.

We have seen that the party leadership justified the new principles of organization as
beneficial to achieving great production advances. During 1958 Mao made a trip to Moscow
to negotiate the largest Sino-Soviet trade agreement ever, as part of a plan to exchange
the increased agricultural surplus for heavy capital goods. Thus, the leadership in no way
accepted another cardinal tenet of the Left: that a socialist state should strive for
self-sufficiency and avoid becoming dependent on others, especially those whose
ideological position has already been put into question. When the great production
advances failed to materialize, the CCP (just like the Russians and western commentators)
blamed the excessive "Leftism" of the communes and took steps to retreat from
those measures. In fact, the production difficulties of 1959-1961 resulted from a
combination of severe natural calamities, unrealistic output targets, and especially the
incorrect over-emphasis on heavy industry which the CCP had taken over uncritically from
the Soviet experience. The Party Right was able to use the production crisis to completely
overwhelm the Left and begin to undo the accomplishments of the Great Leap. In 1961-62, as
we shall describe in the next section, the retreat turned into a rout as the new ruling
bourgeois forces took China rapidly along the capitalist road.

Before moving on, it is important to consider the following question: Was the People's
Republic of China a proletarian dictatorship during the period 1949-1959? We have seen
that it set up a number of arrangements which violated the teachings of Marx and Lenin on
the condition of workers' rule (standing army, cadre income, etc.). Moreover, its foreign
policy during those years was in no essential way different from the type of policy which
our party criticizes today. China was the prime mover in the Bandung conference of
non-aligned nations, strove at all times to establish diplomatic relations with bourgeois
nationalist leaders, upheld unity with the revisionists by signing the Moscow declaration
of 1957 and the 81 party statement of 1960, both of which acknowledged the possibility of
peaceful transition to socialism, and, in general, put forward new-democracy as the
universal strategy for revolution in the contemporary world. Throughout this period,
bourgeois authorities dominated culture and education; and the former capitalist class
continued to enjoy material privileges through its interest-income and high salaries.

But this is only one aspect. The other is the destruction of the landlord class, the
expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie (who, even if they retained some strong
positions from which it engineer a comeback, had certainly become, for a time, subordinate
to the workers and peasants), and the destruction of petty bourgeois property and ideas
among a peasantry which had launched the commune movement. The most important lesson
of the se years is that the poor and middle peasants can grasp Marxism-Leninism and fight
for socialism and communism. Our party's line on the peasants is not an abstract
prediction but is based on the accomplishments of the Chinese peasants and the ideological
consciousness they reached. A great Left force of workers and peasants had been created
which was to re-appear strongly during the GPCR in an attempt to resume the progress
toward communism which had prevailed until 1959.

In the Leninist view, state power is an instrument of the class which holds it, used to
transform the economic, political and ideological conditions of the society. The question
of who holds state power cannot be answered by examining only forms (the Soviet Union,
after all, has a Communist Party and state ownership of property) nor by taking
ideological pronouncements at face value (the Soviet revisionists still occasionally
proclaim their devotion to proletarian dictatorship) but only by determining which
class is transforming society in the direction of its interests. There are only
two forms of state power possible in the modern world: proletarian dictatorship or
bourgeois dictatorship. All theories of third forms: new-democracy, joint dictatorship of
revolutionary classes, democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry, etc., are
incorrect and correspond to no objective reality. In China between 1949 and 1959, the
primary aspect of social change was in the direction of communism, despite the errors of
line and policy which were to have such a devastating effect. No bourgeois dictatorship
would have created the people's communes or free supply or thoroughly liquidated the
landlord class or removed the capitalists from much of their power. In 1949 a workers'
state came into existence in China and from its positive accomplishments we can learn much
about what socialism is and will be.

THE RESTORATION OF BOURGEOIS RULE

The communes of 1958 has totally abolished private plots of land. It is important,
therefor, to look at the available information for the period 1960-66 to see what changes
had intervened. In 1964, a delegation of agriculturists and economists from Pakistan
toured a sample of communes. Their observations were collected and used as the basis for
the book: S. J. Burki, A Study of Chinese Communes, 1965. They found that in
1964 the 10 communes they surveyed, which included a large variety in terms of region and
size, averaged 7.55% of the total land in private plots. For four communes which made more
detailed information available, the following had been the change over time:

YEAR Per Cent of land under Private Ownership

1958 --

1959 1.39

1960 2.79

1961 4.24

1962 6.40

1963 7.61

1964 8.64

The private plots, however, played a larger part in the peasant's lives than these
figures indicate because of the higher value of the crops grown on them. The top 10
communes showed the following income figures:

COMMUNE Private Plot Income as %

of Total Family Income

1. 20.8

2. 30.2

3. 18.4

4. 22.9

5. 17.1

6. 16.9

7. 20.6

8. 19.4

9. 13.5

10. 8.8

average 19.3

Even this data under-estimates the revival of private agriculture and its role in rural
livelihood. More detailed information comes from the Lien-chiang documents, a series of
directives and reports concerning communes in Lien-chiang country in Fukien province on
the east China coast. They cover the years 1962-63 and were seized during a Nationalist
Chinese raid on the coast. (They are translated and annotated in Chen, C. S. (ed.), Rural
People's Communes in Lien-chiang). We quote from the editor's summary of the
statistics provided by the documents:

The area of private plots, by law, could note exceed five to seven per cent of a
team's crop area. (A team, at that time, contained, on the average, 24 households and a
brigade, 171 households.) Nevertheless, in the Hu-li brigade the private plots amounted to
9.5 per cent of its crop land. The situation varied from team to team in the brigade. At
one extreme, the private plots in one team amounted to 11 per cent of its crop land and at
the other, 7.6 per cent. In the Shan-K'ang brigade, the private plots in the individual
teams ranged from 12.1 per cent to 15 per cent of the crop area, the average being 13.1
per cent. For the two brigades, the private plots averaged 11.3 per cent of their crop
land, which was substantially higher than the limit set by the law.

Besides the private plots, team members might also hold reclaimed land and land for
growing animal feed. In addition, some land collectively owned by the team was farmed out
to the members for cultivation.

The reclaimed land in the county amounted to 40,000 mou, or 19.6 per cent of the crop
area.

Farmed-out land was 4,178 mou, or 2.05 per cent of the country's crop area. Private
plots (11.3 per cent), reclaimed land (19.6 per cent) and farmed-out land (2.05 per cent)
together constituted the "Small Freedom" land, which amounted to more than 30
per cent of the crop area. In some teams the production was more than 50 per cent.
Households were permitted to engage in such subsidiary domestic enterprises as embroidery,
sewing, knitting and bee-keeping. The products, except for the kinds and quantities
subject to state purchase, could be disposed of in the free market. A surprisingly large
variety of private activities, which would be thought impossible under a socialist system,
was pursued by members of the commune system. Many commune members engaged in peddling.
Selling what was produced by oneself was permitted, but re-selling what one purchased from
others (er pan shang) was generally viewed with approval. Some members did odd jobs
("rat work") outside their own commune units. Half the 106 member labor force of
the Lien-teng brigade in the Ao-chiang commune worked outside: 31 in stonemasonry and
earth-work, three in carpentry, 44 in peddling and 27 in miscellaneous jobs. The profits
from peddling totalled 8,200 Yuan, averaging 196 Yuan per peddler (four of the peddlers
made profits of more than 1,000 Yuan each). Members who worked outside the team would have
to surrender their earnings to the team. Failing to do so, they would be given no ration
and would have to buy food at high prices and be subjected to certain fines. Lending money
at high interest was fairly prevalent. It was reported that in three communes....384
households engaged in lending at high interest, involving a total of 72,440 Yuan in
principal. The rate of interest ranged from 1 to 1.5 per cent.

He calculates a breakdown of the peasants income sources:

Source of Income Value (Yuan)

Collective:

Rations 19.87

Retained fruits 4.50

Work-points 41.88

Income from collective system 66.25

Private:

Private plots 7.14

Reclaimed land 14.28

sub. dom. enterprise (unknown)

misc. private income (unknown)

Total Private Income 21.42

Total income per person/year 87.67

From this table it can be seen that private sources contributed about a quarter of
total income, and this does not take into account the miscellaneous and illegal sources,
which in some cases could be quite large. Moreover, the high prices paid for subsidiary
products, such as livestock and vegetables, grown privately, presented the peasant with
the constant temptation to divert his effort from the collective to the private sector.
Many cases are reported of peasants attending to their private plots by day and making up
by working the collective land at night.

Even more significant for ideological and political trends is the organization of the
collective sector itself. A large-scale desocialization of the communes took
place over the period 1959-62. By this is meant that property and control over its use
were transferred downward from higher-level units to lower-level, from the commune to the
brigade to the team, in order to bring about a closer relation between individual output
and reward and restore the primary role of material incentive. The communes went through
three distinct stages, depending on which level of organization was the "accounting
unit". (An accounting unit, roughly defined, "carries on independent
accounting, is responsible for its own profits and losses, organizes production, and
distributes income."--Lien chiang, Document VII.) From Aug. 1958 to March 1959, the
commune itself, with an average of 5,000 households, was the accounting unit. In March
1959, the CC decided to shift the accounting unit from commune to brigade. Then in Nov.
1969, it issued a directive establishing the team as the accounting unit. (In the
meantime, the number of communes had been tripled and their average size reduced to 1622
households. A team had an average membership of 24 households in 1963.) This new
arrangement was formalized in one of the most important documents of recent Chinese
history, The Revised Draft Regulations Governing Rural People's Communes,
promulgated in Sept. 1962.

The basic principles of ownership and income distribution are set forth in these
regulations:

Article 21

Land within the scope of the production team is all owned by the production team.
None of the land owned by he commune, including the members' private plots, private hills
and housing may be rented out or bought or sold.

Labor power within the scope of the production team is all to be controlled by he
production team. Transfer of labor power for use by the commune or the production brigade
must be discussed with the mass of members. It may not be requisitioned without their
agreement.

Large domestic animals and agricultural implements owned collectively by the production
team may not be requisitioned by the commune or the brigade. Any agricultural implements,
small scale agricultural machines and large domestic animals formerly owned by the
communes or brigade which may be suitably owned by and utilized by the production team
should revert to production team ownership....

Article 22

The production team has autonomy with regard to production operations and
management and distribution of income....

Article 31

For convenience in organizing production, the production team may be divided into
permanent or temporary work groups, each to be assigned a section of land to work on a
short-term, seasonal or year-round basis.

Groups and individuals who are active in labor, responsible in management, noteworthy
in achievements, or who overfulfill their obligations must be given suitable rewards.
Those groups and individuals who are not active in labor, are irresponsible in management,
and who do not fulfill their obligations must be given a suitable reduced payment for
labor or other punishment.

Article 32

The production team should give reasonable payment for the labor of its members, it
should avoid egalitarianism among the members in calculating payment for labor.

....Payment for labor requiring technical skills in agriculture or herding should be
higher than that for common labor.

The over-all effect of these regulations was to bring back the situation where the
peasant's view was limited to producing for the immediate small group of which he was a
part. The beginnings of any aspects of communist distribution and communist morality
(working for the sake of a larger and larger collective) were reversed completely. Along
with this the experiments in free supply of grain on a commune-wide scale were wound up
and income differentials between teams reappeared with full force.

These organizational changes were accompanied by an ideological campaign to justify the
reversal of the original commune spirit. Private sideline occupations were said to be not
only compatible with the collective economy but a necessary stimulus to it. Piece-rates,
similar to those prevalent in industry, were encourages as the best way to tie reward to
effort. And the motif, "this is the period of socialism; communism must wait until
the full development of productive forces", was dominant once again. The argument was
made that private plots and team-ownership did not represent movements toward capitalism
for the following reasons: 1) The private plots are owned by the brigades and only
assigned to members for use. They cannot be transferred or sold; 2) Collective labor takes
up the majority of member's time. 3) Only the collective economy can provide the tools and
raw materials necessary for sidelines production; and 4) The markets for private output
are controlled by the state. It was also pointed out that individual production is not the
same as capitalist production, since the latter required free purchase of means of
production and existence of an expropriated proletariat. (Hsiao Liang, "Is
Development of Family Side Occupations Likely to Aid Capitalist Spontaneity", transl.
in CB, no. 677, pp. 14-17.)

But this is a typical revisionist argument. Nobody claimed that private plots,
contracting of land by peddling, withholding effort from the collective, material
incentive systems and all the other bourgeois tendencies characteristic of this period
were already full-blown capitalism. The Left ideologists of the Great Leap had simply
pointed out that the entire period of Socialism was a class struggle between
capitalism and communism, that during this period a fierce and continuous struggle
would take place between those who wanted to freeze the revolution at some particular
stage and then reverse it. Those who advocate the compatibility of private and collective
tendencies, rather than their fundamental contradiction, will end up objectively
building bourgeois consciousness among the masses and creating the conditions,
ideologically, for the restoration of capitalism. Any time the revolution ceases moving
forward toward communism as its clear goal, it will immediately begin to turn around
towards capitalism. There is no middle position. Because of their concern
for quantitative levels of production (implicitly defining socialism as material
improvement) the CCP leadership created organization and ideology in the countryside and
weakened proletarian consciousness and weakened proletarian consciousness. A clear example
of this position is provided by the following article.

As we know, the system of distribution of "to each according to his work"
enforced in rural people's communes at the present stage represents a sort of material
incentive and material guarantee in-so-far as the laborers are concerned. It plays an
important part in stimulating the labor enthusiasm of commune members. But does this mean
that material incentive is the only way to heightening one's production enthusiasm? No. It
must be realized that only with politics assuming command is it possible for material
incentive to play its part correctly.

....the party's policy is, on the one, hand, to make it clear to the masses that their
most fundamental interest lie in speeding up socialist construction and, on the other
hand, to take the greatest care f the immediate living conditions an material benefits of
the masses. In h handling the relations between the state, the collective an the
individual in people's communes, over-emphasis on the collective and long-range interests
is unfavorable to the raising of the production enthusiasm of the masses....if the
principle of "to each according to his work" is not adhered to, those commune
members who have strong labor-power and do more work will feel they are put at a
disadvantage. If one simply looks at the superiority of collective labor and collective
economy and loses sight of the small freedom permitted within the big collective and the
necessity of meeting the diversified needs of members at the same time as increasing
social wealth, one is disregarding the present level of production and consciousness of
the masses...thus, it is not proper to set political command against material incentive.
Political command and material incentive are united; they may not be cut apart; nor one
stressed to the neglect of the other. (Chao Hsu-kuang, from Kung-ren Ribao, Dec. 1,
1961. Transl. in CB, no. 677, pp. 23-25._

In articles like this and many others of the period the bourgeois principle of material
incentive and the proletarian principle of politics taking command are not seen as waging
a life and death struggle. Rather, in line with the new-democratic idea of utilizing the
bourgeoisie constructing socialism, they are seen as each playing a useful
role; their relation is primarily one of unity and only secondarily one of struggle.
This reversal of the unity-contradiction relations is the essence of revisionism, seen
from the standpoint of dialectics.

Nor was the revival of revisionist ideas and policies limited to the rural areas. Major
changes took place in industrial management, economic planning and wage payments. The
system that began during the Great Leap of transferring managerial control to the Party
Committee at the factory level was ended and the managers returned with even greater power
than before 1957. The manager is responsible for meeting certain financial targets set by
the State Plan. The main ones are profit targets and cost reduction targets. In meeting
these he has a great deal of discretion in determining what the enterprise shall produce,
in placing orders with other factories ore retail agencies and in using advertising to
solicit orders for his goods. Contracts between enterprises are widely used and are
legally binding. There is a good deal of evidence that the State has surrendered
allocational controls over many goods, allowing them to be exchanged through the market.
Before 1957, all profits above the set targets were taken by the state, with a portion
returned to the enterprise for bonuses. In that year, however, and continuing to the
present, a profit-sharing scheme was worked out. Under this, the enterprise was allowed to
retain a fixed percentage of all profits above the target. This can be used for bonuses to
staff and workers as well as for expansion of the scale of the enterprise.

Closely connected with these changes in management and planning are the return to
piece-rates and material incentives in the factories. In early 1961, enterprises were
urged to cut down on employment, keeping only the best of their workers. Those retained
would share more greatly in the excess profits of the enterprise. Piece-rates were
advocated even more strenuously than before the Great Leap. A new device used was team
piece-rates, which set groups of workers against one another in production competition.

These new policies were summarized in the so-called "70 Articles on
Industrial Policy" reputedly authored by Liu Shao-ch'i and Po I-po in Dec.
1961. Here are excerpts from these:

Article 2. The task and target in industry from now on is "the market comes
first."

Article 9. All industrial units which show a deficit in "economic
accounting", with the exception of those designated, are henceforth to cease
operating.

Article 21. The currently enforced eight hours of study and eight hours of meeting each
week should be reduced as much as possible in order to avoid interfering with the rest
time of the employees and workers.

Article 22. Henceforth no industrial unit is to summon its employees and workers again
to engage in "bitter battles".

Article 25. Factories may calculate piece-work wages when feasible.

Article 26. When it is not feasible to calculate piece work, they may implement a
collective piece-work system.

Article 52. Carry out the system of the factory manager bearing responsibility under
the leadership of the party committee.

Article 65. Unions having 50 or more members are permitted to have a chairman who is
half-removed from production. Those with 200 or more members may have a union chairman who
is entirely removed from production. Those with over 500 men may have two men who are
removed from production.

Special attention should be given to Article 9, which stipulates the domination of
profits over production. (During this period Chinese economists began to write about
"market socialism"; the content of their theories was in essence the same as
that coming forth from Liberman in the Soviet Union, and revisionists like Sik and Brus in
Eastern Europe.) The essential effect of a genuinely planned economy is that the
production pattern which results, being determined by a social calculation of the people's
needs, would differ from the pattern determined by a monetary calculation of costs and
profits. This article enforces a market-determined pattern by eliminating enterprises
which don't meet the monetary test.

Articles 21 and 22 register the leadership's opposition to the participation of the
workers in struggles against managers and technicians and their concern that excessive
political study and debate would reduce labor productivity.

What sort of man will the President see in Chou En-lai? Chou is clearly one of the
world's ablest negotiators. Handsome and exuding charisma, he is now, in his 73rd year,
tireless. In August 1967, Chou negotiated his way out of his most perilous moment in the
Cultural Revolution. Though idolized by youth, he was, for more than two days and nights,
surrounded in his offices in the Great Hall by a half a million ultra-leftist Red Guards.
Their leaders--some later arrested as counter-revolutionaries--were seeking to seize the
files of the Central Committee--and Chou himself. Mao and Lin Piao were both absent. By
talking to small groups, day and night, Chou gradually persuaded the masses--so Chou
called them in talking to me-- to disperse. It was only following that incident that Lin
Piao brought thousands of troops into the capital, and the disarming and breakup of the
Red Guards began in earnest--with heavy casualties.

--Edgar Snow in Life

Chou tells it like it was: how Left Red Guards almost had his head. Use of Mao cult,
backed up by armed forces, played on Left's weaknesses.

Another major bourgeois trend during 1960-66 was the system of temporary and contract
labor which came into use. Under this, the number of workers permanently assigned to
enterprises was reduced while the number who were temporarily employed when work was
available and then let go was increased. In this way, enterprise managers had more
flexible control over costs of production and could shift social insurance and public
welfare costs on to the communes and the State.

It was the Right forces within the party which seized control after the Great Leap.
Many of the young cadre who had led and supported the Great Leap were purged or demoted.
The party, under the leadership of the Right, became the representative of the bourgeois
forces which had been slowly developing and consolidating; the senior cadres, the officer
corps, the professional managers and technicians; all those whom the concessions of
new-democracy had put into privileged economic positions. Even the old capitalist remnants
got a new lease on life when the Party, in 1962, decided to extend their fixed-interest
payments for at least five more years.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is itself a form of continuous and sharp class
struggle. New bourgeois forces are constantly emerging from the ranks of the people. If
bourgeois ideology is not decisively combated, it is possible at any stage
in the transition to communism for the movement to be reversed and the bourgeoisie to come
back to power. This does not mean that the full economic and political structure of
capitalism can quickly be restored; that requires a transition period during which the new
bourgeois ruling class undermines and dismantles the socialist aspects of the economic
base. What it does mean is that the power of the state is now being used to move the
ideological consciousness of the people away from communism and toward capitalism.
That kind of use of state power is the essential definition of the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie and that is what came to prevail in China in the period 196-1966.

THE ANTI-SOVIET REVISIONIST CAMPAIGN 1959-1966

One factor would seem to contradict the characterization of China, 1960-66, as a
bourgeois dictatorship; the split in the international communist movement and the sharp
anti-revisionist struggle waged by the CCP. Why would the new "red" bourgeoisie
feel it necessary to defend the ideology of Marxism-Leninism against the changes the
Russians were advocating. Two fundamental points can be made about this struggle.

1) At no time did the CCP question any of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism as it had
always interpreted it, especially its compromises with nationalism and united-fronts
against Soviet denials of its basic concepts: proletarian dictatorship vs. "state of
the whole people" and armed struggle vs. peaceful transition. Major Chinese
documents, such as the Proposal on the General Line, 1963, and Lin Piao's Long
Live the Victory of People's War, 1965, reaffirmed the nationalism-based strategy
that had brought the Chinese revolution to power. The practice of Chinese foreign policy
did not alter significantly during the period of the anti-Soviet polemics; in fact, the
Chinese re-doubled their efforts to put themselves at the head of an anti-U.S. imperialism
coalition of nations. Chou En-Lai made an extensive tour through Africa in 1964, lauding
such bourgeois regimes as that of Toure in Guinea and Nkrumah in Ghana. He especially went
out of his way to make overtures to the Algerians and Egyptians. 1961-1965 saw the
development of close relations between China and Indonesia. Liu Shao-ch'i visited
Indonesia in 1963 and stated, "The Republic of Indonesia has become an important
force opposing imperialism and colonialism and safeguarding the peace and security of
Southeast Asia and Asia as a whole." (Peking Review, April 19, 1963).
The Chinese line in Indonesia was to lead the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to the
disaster of 1965 in which it was virtually destroyed.

Moreover, throughout the period of bitter back and forth polemics, the Chinese
continued to maintain effective unity of action with the Soviet Union in
delivering arms to Vietnam over the Chinese railroads. At no time did the Chinese engage
in public polemics against the Soviet aid.

2) The immediate cause of the split was Russian refusal to provide the Chinese with
atomic weapons or even the technical assistance and materials necessary to produce them.
One of the purposes of Mao's Moscow trip in 1958 was to persuade Khruschev to make this
available. The polemics heated up considerable shortly after his failure. The Chinese have
given this explanation themselves?

In 1958 the leadership of the CPSU put forward unreasonable demands designed to
bring China under Soviet military control. These unreasonable demands were rightly and
firmly rejected by the Chinese government. Not long afterwards, in June 1959, the Soviet
government unilaterally tore up the agreement between China and the Soviet Union in
October, 1957, and refused to provide China with a sample of an atomic bomb and technical
data concerning its manufacture. (The Origin and Development of the Differences Between
the Leadership of the CPSU and Ourselves. Peking, 1963, p. 26).

This was followed by Soviet refusal to support China in the Formosa straits, the
proposed summit meeting of Khruschev and Eisenhower and Soviet support for India in her
border dispute with China. What the Chinese objected to most strongly was Russian
rapprochement with the U.S. and desertion of support of Chinese foreign policy goals.

What then is the real meaning of the dispute? The Russian bourgeoisie had seized power
some years earlier and was already well along the way to restoring capitalism. Given the
degree to which the Russian workers and peasants had lost confidence in Marxism-Leninism
and given the long period during which nationalist ideas had been emphasized (from before
WWII), the new Russian bourgeoisie could proceed to the renunciation of Marxism-Leninism
without fear of popular reaction and begin to create a revisionist ideology more in
correspondence to the new material conditions of bourgeois rule.

[PHOTOGRAPH OF RALLY OUTSIDE SOVIET EMBASSY IN PEKING]

caption: During height of GPCR, thousands of Chinese workers gathered to
demonstrate outside Soviet embassy in Peking, showing their hatred of revisionist bosses.

The newly consolidated Chinese "red" bourgeoisie, however, was coming to
state power at a time when hundreds of millions of Workers and Peasants still looked upon
Marxism-Leninism as a correct guide to social practice. But analysis of the objective
historical process has shown us that Marxism-Leninism in the particular version that
characterized the line of the CCP and the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, contained a number
of incorrect ideas which led inexorably to bourgeois restoration. No doubt the
Chinese leaders consciously believed that they were defending genuinely revolutionary
ideas against Soviet revisionism. The anti-Soviet polemics were necessary in order to
defend that body of ideas which corresponded to the class interests of the bourgeois
class. Had the Chinese leaders gone along with Khruschevite ideology they would have been
exposed before the masses and would have lost the "Left" cover under which
capitalist counter-revolution is most likely to succeed.

Moreover, the ideological imperative corresponded to the desire of the new Chinese
bourgeois forces to free themselves from excessive economic and military dependence on the
Soviet Union and create the material and scientific infrastructure for the development of
their own atomic arsenal. The attempts by Soviet leaders to moderate the inter-imperialist
rivalry with the U.S. opened up the possibility that the Chinese bourgeoisie could
displace the USSR as the leader of a world wide united front of "oppressed
nations" against U.S. imperialism (now joined by Soviet social-imperialism).

Nothing in these external struggles contradicts the view, derived from internal
evidence, that the bourgeoisie had regained power in China in the early 1960s.

MORE ON THE GPCR

We began this report by summarizing the class forces in the cultural revolution. We
then presented evidence to confirm the position of the so-called "extreme left"
that most senior cadres and army officers had become a new bourgeoisie which was carrying
out capitalist restoration. We can now look at some of the details of this great
revolution in the light of that Left outlook.

The new element created by the GPCR was the existence of a great many mass
organizations of students and workers. These tended to divide along political
lines. Left groups, such as "Sheng-wu-Lien" in Hunan and "May 16
Corps" in Peking, took the leading role in the early days of the GPCR in attacking
the high-level power-holders in the municipalities and provinces. These cadres, in turn,
organized and supported mass organizations to defend their positions: these mass
organizations waged protracted and then violent struggle with one another.

The mass organizations which favored "seizure of power" overthrew the
existing senior cadre in many important provinces and municipalities in Dec. 1966 and Jan.
1967. In Peking, Shanghai and Taiyuan, the people moved in to set up organs of power
modeled on the Paris Commune. The implication of the commune arrangement was that all the
existing cadre should be removed and replaced by new leaders elected by the membership of
the mass organizations. The students and workers who put forward this demand were quite
sure that they had the support of Chairman Mao in proclaiming the commune-type state as
their goal. On Feb. 5, 1967 the Shanghai commune was proclaimed and all the leading cadre
of the Shanghai municipal Council were put on notice that they would be evaluated by the
people. A new organ of power, the provisional committee for the Shanghai People's Commune,
was established, with members drawn from a number of mass organizations which had
participated in the power-structure. The most important leader of the commune was Chang
Ch'un ch'iao, who had been a prominent Leftist during the Great Leap. Chang left for
Peking on February 12 to consult with Mao.

When he returned on Feb. 24th, he reported to a mass rally that Chairman Mao opposed
the name Shanghai People's Commune and preferred that it be called Shanghai Revolutionary
Committee, on the model of the new organ of power which had been created in Heilkungkiang
Province (Manchuria) in January. These are the reasons Chang gave:

On the 12th, Chairman Mao called us to Peking, and received us on the same day....

Chairman Mao said: "The present revolution is a revolution under proletarian
dictatorship, one that has been organized and started by ourselves."....As we
understand it Mao showed clearly here that for the past 17 years our country was under
proletarian dictatorship and that is was Chairman Mao's revolutionary line, not the
Liu-Teng line, that was in the ruling position. Why, then, did we need to carry out a
revolution under proletarian dictatorship? Chairman Mao explained: "It is because
some of the organs of proletarian dictatorship have been usurped.

....he noted that the slogan "Thoroughly Improve Proletarian Dictatorship" is
a reactionary one....Speaking correctly, the proletarian dictatorship could only be
improved partially.

Can we do without revolutionary leading cadres? No! A combat team cannot do without a
responsible man. In seizing power now, we must also have cadres, that is, we must also
have new as well as old cadres. Why do we need old cadres who have assumed leadership work
before? The reason is very simple. For instance, some workers perform very well. They dare
to break through and rebel; they are able and have made significant contributions to the
cultural revolution. But if we turn over to them a city such as Shanghai or a province
such as Kiangsu, then they would find it very difficult to manage it because of lack of
experience. They may be more adept in the management of one workshop.

Chairman Mao says, "A university student cannot become a university president for
he has not graduated yet and is not familiar with the whole university." As I see it,
he is not even qualified to become a department head because he has no teaching experience
and no experience of leading the work of the whole department. So we should ask a
professor or assistant professor to lead the department.

Young comrades present at the forum, don't be discouraged. Chairman Mao also says that
young people have made numerous contributions to this great cultural revolution, but they
cannot be once be expected to take over the duties of the secretaries of the Provincial
Party Committee or the Municipal Party Committee. I myself think so too. The
"three-way-combination" provides very good training for the young people. If
young people in their twenties follow the old revolutionary cadres and learn from them for
seven, eight, or ten years, then they are still young when they become secretaries....

There are more than 600 cadres holding the rank of heads of the departments (bureaus)
and more than 6,000 with the rank of section head in Shanghai. How can we fail to find
candidates for the "three-way-combination" from among these?....And the great
majority of these comrades are good.

The idea of "doubting all and overthrowing all" is a reactionary one. This is
not an idea of us rebels, but it has an influence on us. When we are infuriated to see
that many people are so stubborn, we can easily be taken in by the propaganda of others.

....Recently the State Council told us that the rebel headquarters of an organ of the
municipal part committee issued an order to the State Council demanding the abolition of
all posts of "chiefs". Many things said in it were wrong. For instance, it was
stated that "for a long time the department heads control the section heads and the
section heads control the section personnel". I think that the same will be true in
the future also. "The chiefs have always ridden on the backs of the Party and the
people." Comrade Lin Piao is Minister of National Defense, and does he ride on the
backs of the Party and the people? If is reactionary to say that he does.

Chairman Mao explicitly stated: "We shall not be able to survive for a few days if
we do away with even deputy section heads."

Chairman Mao said: ...."names should not be changed too frequently, because the
form is only of secondary importance while the content is primary."

"The main thing is: which class is in power? For instance, the Soviet Union has
changed, yet its name remains the same....

....Now the various provinces and municipalities are learning from Shanghai and calling
themselves people's communes. What should the State Council be called? Should the national
title be changed? If the state is changed into the Chinese People's Commune, then the
chairman of the state would be called commune chairman or director. After the title is
changed, there would still be the question of recognition by foreign countries. I think
the Soviet Union would not "recognize it because to do so would be disadvantageous to
herself."

"Let he Shanghai People's Commune be changed to Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary
Committee....Would you not feel isolated because yours is the only commune in the whole
country? The Jen-min Jih-pao could not publish the news, for it if published it,
all would follow suit, and the series of problems mentioned above would arise."
(Transl. in SCMP, no. 4147, March 27, 1968, pp. 1-19).

Clearly, the Shanghai Committee didn't just have its name changed. The
"three-way-alliance" which Chang brought from Mao as the organizing principle of
the new Revolutionary Committee--an alliance of army cadre, leading cadre who were
"making revolution" (i.e. were willing to denounce Liu), and hand-picked
representatives of some of the mass organizations--was incompatible with the view of the
Leftists among the students and workers. The Shanghai Commune itself, with Chang and Yao
Wen-yuan in the leadership, had already excluded the "Red Revolutionaries", the
most Left student group. On Jan. 27, the latter had tried to question several members of
the Shanghai Writers Union who had been drafting diatribes against them. They were
prevented from doing to by a detachment of troops of the Shanghai garrison, sent on
Chang's orders. When they appealed to the Central CR Group in Peking (of which Chang and
Yao were members) they were condemned as "ultra-leftists". This clash between
the Left and the PLA was only a small foretaste of things to come.

An important editorial in Red Flag in February clarified the line of the CC further:

Leniency should be adopted in making decisions about cadres who have made even very
serious mistakes, after they are criticized and struggled against....

Cadres who have committed mistakes should be given the opportunity to examine,
criticize, and correct them. So long as they make a self-criticism, correct their mistakes
and come over to the side of Chairman Mao's revolutionary line, they can still be given
appropriate leading posts. Many of them can even be drawn into the provisional organs of
power....("Cadres Must be Treated Correctly", Transl. in On the Revolutionary
Three-in-One Combination, FLP, Peking, 1968, p. 36).

A State Council directive of Jan. 23, 1967 ordered the PLA to intervene actively in the
provinces to bring about the formation of Revolutionary Committees. The typical series of
events that followed was: 1) revolutionary mass organizations would overthrow the leading
cadres as supporters of the Liu line; 2) the PLA would prevent these cadres from offering
any kind of armed resistance (through mass organizations that they controlled); 3) some of
the leading cadres, often from the second-line of leadership, would denounce their former
superiors, make phony self-criticisms and organize mass groups to support themselves; 4)
these Right mass organizations would come into sharp and protracted struggle with the Left
which wanted to overthrow all the bourgeois cadres, not just a handful; 5) when this
struggle passed over, as it generally did, to armed struggle, the PLA would intervene, on
orders from the CC and CR Group, to "overcome the contradictions among the
people" and bring everybody, including the new group of "Maoist" cadres,
into a "three-way-alliance". If the Left persisted in refusing to work with the
"red" bourgeoisie, then it was attacked and disarmed by the PLA.

Some examples of the end-result of the process:

In the cavernous Peking Gymnasium, a former diplomat named Yao Teng-shan last month was
unceremoniously dragged before a gallery of 4,000 approving spectators, then forced to bow
down in humble obeisance while his hands and arms were twisted behind his back. The leader
of a Red Guard unit during the frenetic Cultural Revolution, which all but paralyzed China
between 1966 and 1969, Yao was accused of mounting a raid on the Chinese foreign ministry,
burning down the British chancellery, and plotting a personal assault on Premier Chou En
Lai. Yao's reported sentence: ten years in prison.

When Yao's trial got under way, the Chinese made a special offer to see that the
foreign diplomatic community in Peking was fully aware of the proceedings. Chou himself
has pointedly mentioned the case in recent conversations with foreign visitors. The motive
s obvious: China's current leaders are sparing of no effort to disassociate themselves
from the ideological frenzy that threatened China with total chaos and mystified the
watching world for much of the 1960s. Though its press and radio will still crackle with
anti-U.S. and anti-Soviet vitriol, Peking is in the midst of a prodigious effort to
demonstrate that China is once again in the hands of responsible moderates.

-- Time Magazine

Since the end of the GPCR in late 1968, Chinese bosses have been frantically crushing
the leadership and dispersing the rank-and-file of the great Leftist movement which almost
threw them on the garbage heap. They fear the high level of socialist consciousness
reached by masses of Chinese workers and peasants. who will someday rise up to take power
back for the working class.

In Heliungkiang, the co-chairmen of the Rev. Comm. were P'an Fu-sheng, first secretary
of the former Provincial Party Committee, and Want Chia-tao, commander of the Military
Region; in Shangtung, the chairman was Wang Hsiao-yu, ex-deputy mayor of the province's
largest city. In Tsinghai the chairman was Liu Hsien ch'uan, commander and party secretary
of the Military District. In Szechuan, the chairman was Chang Kuo-hua, First Commissar of
Chengtu Military Region and the commander of the Tibet operations of the PLA. In Kansu, Hu
Chi-tsung, secretary of the former Provincial Party Committee, became a deputy-chairman.

It was this overall movement that the Left later came to call the "February
Adverse Current of Capitalist Restoration" or the "Evil Wind of March". The
sharpest struggle was in the city of Canton. There the Leftist organizations were so
strong that the CC had to place the province under direct military rule. Huang Yung-sheng
(presently Minister of Defense) was sent to Canton to take command. The Leftist Red Flag
faction attacked the military command several times during the following months, seizing
arms, records, etc. and agitating for the removal of Huang. The armed struggle in Canton
continued into mid-1968 before the resistance of the Left had finally been suppressed.

Between February and August 1967 the Left forces became more and more conscious and
began to focus on the persons and institutions they held responsible for the failure of
the leading cadre to "step aside". They directed their fire at Chou En-lai and
the Vice-Premiers he was sheltering. Chen I and his Foreign Ministry and the PLA. Red
Guards in Peking held several mass rallies denouncing Li Hisen-nien and Nieh Jung-chen,
both high-ranking PLA generals who had turned to economic affairs. (The latter was in
charge of the nuclear development program.) On each occasion Chou personally intervened to
rescue his fellow bureaucrats. In July, 1967, Lin Chieh, editor of Red Flag
(he was purged in August) published an editorial calling for the "dragging out of a
small handful of capitalist-roaders in the Army". Even though this formulation was
compromising (a "small handful") it was still too much for Mao and Lin Piao who
insisted that the members of the CR Group who had connections with the radicals he purged.
Chiang Chi'ing (Madam Mao), who had brought these men onto the Group in the first place,
was prevailed upon to denounce her proteges in a speech to a meeting of representatives
from Anhwei on Sept. 5,

....Comrades, I am not in favor of armed struggle and you must not think that I like
it, because I'm for 'peaceful struggle, not armed struggle'....Armed struggle always hurts
some people and damages state property.

At present, let us take Peking as an example. There is a bad thing, and I call it a bad
thing because it is a counter-revolutionary organization, called the "May 16"
corps. Numerically it is not a large organization, and superficially the majority of its
members are young people, who are actually hoodwinked. The minority consists bourgeois
elements....who make use of the ideological instability of the young people....The
"May 16" assumes an "ultra-Leftist" appearance; it centers its
opposition on the Premier (Chou).

Now we come to the second question: the army. Sometimes earlier, there was this wrong
slogan: Seize a 'small handful in the Army'. As a result, 'a small handful in the Army'
was seized everywhere and even the weapons of our regular troops were seized.

Comrades, come to think of it: if our field Army were thrown into confusion and if
trouble occurred, could we tolerate such a situation?....The slogan is wrong. Because the
Party, the government and the Army are all under the leadership of the Party. We can only
talk about dragging out the handful of Party capitalist roaders in authority and nothing
else....Even if some comrades in our Army committed serious errors, they need not be dealt
with in this way.

I have talked with the young fighters of Peking about this question. Last year you went
out to kindle the fire of the revolution and exchange revolutionary experience. But by
going out again now, you will only do a disservice. You said that you were unable to drag
out the small handful in the Army and that you needed our help in doing this. In some
places, this has been done. This is a wrong assessment of the situation, and the result of
the fact that you have fallen into a trap set by others.

We must not paint a dark picture of the PLA, for they are our boys and we must protect
their honor. (Here she reads out the CC's Sept. 5 Order Forbidding Seizure of Arms....from
the PLA, which instructed the Army to respond with force to attempted seizures.) Do you
know what has happened? Military materials allotted for the support of Vietnam have been
seized, and the ammunition. Those were ammunitions for striking the American imperialists!

....Some people also seized foreign ships. In Peking a strange thing has happened: some
people wen tot he foreign embassies to make troubles and the office of the British Charge
d'Affaires was burned down. We, of course, are determined to hit the American imperialists
and reactionaries. But we must not make trouble at foreign embassies, and we must not go
aboard foreign ships. It would be childish for good people to do so; and when bad people
do so, they want to ruin the reputation of the country.

During August a sharp struggle took place around the Foreign Ministry. Struggle
sessions had been taking place against Chen I since June and had forced Chinese foreign
policy slightly Leftward. Statements appeared focusing on armed revolutionary struggle
against Ne Win in Burma and Sihanouk in Cambodia. In August Leftists, led by Yao
Teng-shan, last Chinese representative in Indonesia, seized the Foreign Ministry. The
British mission was sacked and burned, rebellion in Hong Kong was encouraged, foreign
ships were boarded and cargo seized and editorials began to oppose the Vietnamese
negotiations. But this period ended rapidly when Mao personally intervened to
"save" Chen I and began to repair the damage the Left had caused to China's
"diplomatic position".

After September the formation of revolutionary committees continued in more provinces.
But the Left had also grown stronger in several provinces and continued to resist the
continuation of bourgeois rule under this new guise. In Hunan, "Sheng-wu-lien"
held out until April before being crushed and disbanded by the PLA. The most protracted
struggle took place, however, in Kwangsi, the province bordering on North Vietnam. Here,
the Kwangsi "April 22 Rebel Grand Army" had been engaged in seizing arms bound
for Vietnam and in preventing the formation of a stable revolutionary committee. A leaflet
of June 1968 reveals how the cadres on the preparatory group for the revolutionary
committees armed the members of conservative organizations to attack "April 22".
As a result of the battle, says the leaflet:

....more than 2,000 buildings were reduced to rubble in Wuchow, more than 4,000
inhabitants rendered homeless, hundreds of rebel fighters and revolutionary masses
arrested, creating a serious situation in which die-hard conservatives and
capitalist-roaders tried to reverse previous correct decisions on them. (Transl. in SCMP,
no. 42113, p. 4).

Leaders of "April 22" and its rivals, along with Army leaders, were called to
Peking in July for a meeting to settle the conflict. There, April 22, like the Leftists of
Peking, Shanghai and Hunan, found out too late which side Chairman Mao was really on. At
the meeting, "April 22" was condemned, the Army was ordered to protect the
railway lines to Vietnam (many of which had been closed for months by Leftist railway
workers) and the composition of the preparatory group was approved. (The CC Notices on the
Kwangsi situation are translated in URS, Vol. 53, Nos. 1 and 2; the minutes
of the above meeting in URS, Vol. 53, No. 9).

By autumn of 1968 the Left had been defeated everywhere and the new power structure was
consolidated. A portion of the cadres had been purged, although many were and will be
re-educated and rehabilitated, but the great bulk of the cadres who had carried through
the bourgeois policies of 1960-66 remained in power. The role of the military officers had
increased, as can be seen in the composition of the new 9th CC, announced at the 9th CC
Party Congress in April 1969. Of the 279 members, 123 are military cadres, 76 are leading
political cadres and 80 are former members of mass organizations loyal to the Right. The
continuity of political leadership is shown by the fact that eight of all 11 members of
the Standing Committee of the Politbureau of the 8th Central Committee (elected in 1956)
are full members of the new 9th CC. Twenty-three members of the new CC had been criticized
and repudiated in mass struggles during the GPCR. The Cultural Revolution, as an attempt
by the proletariat to take power back from the bourgeois revisionists, has failed and the
Right is in firm control of the CCP.

Why did it fail? The basic reason is insufficient mass support and an important factor
in that was misconception about the role of Mao Tse-tung. Repeatedly, the Left forces, or
at least some part of them, continued to hope that Mao would come over to their side and
agree to lead a new Marxist-Leninist party to attack the entire bourgeois class. Because
they waited upon his moves and looked to his initiative, the Left constantly found itself
unorganized and insufficiently prepared for the sharp attacks made upon it by the Army,
with Mao's approval. Behind the weakness lies the long history of the personal cult of
Mao, which culminated in the quasi-religious glorification of him during the GPCR. This
played and especially bit part within the Army, where Lin Piao had been leading a
"learn from Chairman Mao" campaign since 1962-63. Their reluctance to admit (or
even conceive) that Chairman Mao might be wrong in his evaluation of the situation must
have led many Leftists to accept, partially, a Centrist stance. This failure to break with
Maoism, ideologically and organizationally, led to their defeat. Moreover, the bourgeoisie
had used the period 1960-66 to conduct an intense ideological campaign against Leftist
thought which must have weakened the ideological consciousness of the masses to the point
where only a minority, though a very large one, was willing to follow the Left into
battle.

Since the end of 1968, the Leftist students and workers have been sent away from the
centers of power as part of the "hsia-fang" movement of sending young people to
live and work among the peasants in remote and difficult regions. In itself, there is
nothing wrong with students going to learn from peasants; but, at this particular time and
in this political context, the main aspect of "hsia-fang" is to fragment the
Left and remove it from contact with the urban proletariat.

None of the Leftward ideological or economic trends of the GPCR can last. Material
incentives are reappearing as the emphasis shifts overwhelmingly in publications and
propaganda as the emphasis shifts to technical innovations (see any recent Peking Review).
The Draft Regulations for Rural People's Communes of 1961-62 have never been changed; in
fact, the CC, throughout the GPCR, emphasized that they would be around for at least 30
years. With the Right in firm political control, these trends will continue.